Guillermina Yanguas, Director General of Environmental Quality and Assessment and the Natural Environment of the Ministry, wanted to emphasize the importance of environmental jobs in Spain, whose figure in the last decade has gone from 160,000 to 530,000 jobs.

During the high-level working table on Employment and Biodiversity, at the XI Conference of the Parties (COP11) of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity held in Hyderabad (India), Guillermina Yanguas pointed out that “we must promote initiatives linked to the ‘green economy’, because they have the duality that they contribute both to conserving biodiversity and to creating new and necessary job opportunities”.

The Director General wanted to publicise, within the framework of the working meeting, some of the examples of green economy that have been developed in Spain. Among them, he highlighted the protection of the areas and species of the Natura 2000 Network, which involves a total of 121 conservation projects until 2015, with an investment of 97 million euros, as well as the projects of the Biodiversity Foundation that seek to promote green jobs. “One of the great challenges assumed by this body of the Ministry is the creation of employment and the dynamization of economic activity in sectors linked to the environment, trying to reconcile in this way the protection of natural heritage with economic growth,” said Guillermina Yanguas, who wanted to emphasize the importance  of the initiatives such as the Empleaverde Programme, co-financed by the European Social Fund, created to promote the development of green SMEs or the Emprendeverde Network that already has more than 3,000 entrepreneurs.